Digital History Curriculum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln introduces undergraduate and graduate students to the Digital Humanities methods and provides them the skills necessary for developing Digital History research and teaching projects. Each course looks at research, skills, and tools digital humanists use in their projects.
The History Harvest (History 396: Special Problems)
The History Harvest is an open, digital archive of historical artifacts gathered from local communities across the United States. Local people share their historical artifacts and stories for inclusion in a unique digital archive of what we are calling the people’s history.
Historical 3D Modeling (History 397: Special Topics)
Students in this course train intensively to learn basic skills in 3D modeling and animation, and discuss the interpretative and philosophical challenges of digitally reconstructing past spaces. Each student designs and creates an original historical reconstruction of a significant American cultural heritage site, informed by architectural and archaeological reports from the US Parks Service as well as their own research. Students make the models ready for web publication and write virtual tours to guide users through the reconstructions.
Digital History (History 470/870)
This course is designed to help undergraduate and graduate students develop expertise in the theories and tools of digital historical scholarship. It intends to promote collaborative learning processes and to develop your skills as both thinkers and writers regardless of your field of study.
Interdisciplinary Readings in Digital Humanities (History 946)
Digital Humanities (DH) is an interdisciplinary scholarly activity that attempts to bring digital technology into useful dialogue with the humanities disciplines (philosophy, history, religion, law, ancient and modern languages, literature, and art).
DH centers on the investigation, analysis, synthesis, and presentation of knowledge using computational media. It studies how digital media affect the disciplines, as well as how knowledge is constructed, maintained, processed, understood, and communicated.
Digital humanists create archival collections, databases, and digitized objects. They use computational methods to analyze humanities materials in digital form and address scholarly questions about these sources. They also often present their scholarship only in digital formats, making it accessible electronically and, more important, able to be transmuted, multiplied, revised, and reconstituted. Audiences and users, these scholars believe, may do different operations on the same materials resulting in multivalent outcomes.
DH teaching involves methodological questions, narrative theories, computational programming, technical writing, group projects, and digital media productions. DH teaching often proceeds from authentic learning pedagogy in which students immerse themselves in the information and produce a tool, model, project, or representation.
This graduate readings course surveys the work of DH scholarship, as well as the various theoretical and methodological reflections that have arisen in the field over the last few decades. Students read leading critical works, examine seminal digital projects, and examine the works of leading digital humanities scholars.
Digital History Research Seminar (History 970)
This research seminar course examines leading digital history works of scholarship, explores theories of narrative in hypertext, and develops models of digital scholarship. Students are expected to conduct research around selected topics in history, focus their work on the creation of a digital project, and participate in class discussion on methods and theories of digital media. Projects may take many forms, including but not limited to: web site hypertext, xml/TEI markup of texts, geographic information systems data sets, database development, web programming, animation and simulation, and visualization technologies.
The emphasis in this course is on developing in students an acute awareness of the consequences of writing for the digital medium. Students explore the possibilities for scholarly communication in the digital medium and their theoretical implications at every stage of their work. Students gain instruction from Library's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities staff on technical issues and concentrate their work on the forms of narrative available in the digital medium.
The final research project features the completion of a digital work of scholarship equivalent in scope to a standard research seminar paper.